Cicero to Atticus, written at Cumae on the ninth day before the Kalends of May, 55 BC — 22 or 23 April. The opening news comes from down the road at Puteoli: that Ptolemy XII Auletes, expelled from Egypt in 58 BC and the subject of all the previous year’s senatorial fight in the Lentulus Spinther correspondence, has at last been restored — as in fact he was, by Gabinius’s army from Syria in spring 55. The political concerns of Cicero’s hosts here in the bay are now those of Faustus Cornelius Sulla, in whose library Cicero is reading.

The famous central piece is the comparison: “I would rather sit in that little chair of yours that you have under the bust of Aristotle than in the curule chair of those gentlemen, and walk with you at your house than with the man with whom I see I must be walking.” The walking companion is Pompey, who is on his way over from his own Cumae estate after arriving on the Parilia (21 April). The contrast is the durable Ciceronian formula — the friend’s study against the second consul’s curule throne, the philosopher’s company against the politician’s — and is made the more pointed by the closing report that Cicero is in fact going to walk with the man the next morning. “About that walking, fortune will see, or some god if any god takes thought.”

The closing paragraph drops back to the building works on the Palatine: Atticus is to chase Philotimus on the walkway, the Laconian sweat-room, and the works in the manner of Cyrus the architect. The reckoning of household business sits beside the philosophical preference for the friend’s study; the letter is short, and in the bay April light, it is the very thing.